Last Dance for Durham
Ask Laurie Finstad Knizhnik what prompted her to create the astonishingly dark detective drama Durham County, and she’s likely to answer with a question of her own: “Aren’t you getting tired of what you see on television?” It’s a frank reply that goes a long way towards explaining her approach on the gritty series, now in it’s third and final season.
If you’ve never spent any time in Durham, consider yourself warned: it’s anything but your typical suburban community, especially compared to those usually seen in Canadian productions. And that’s always been the point.
“You’re dealing with the rape and murder of fifteen-year-old girls who look sweet and innocent in the first scene,” MUSE entertainment CEO and executive producer Michael Prupas recalls of pilot episode. “It’s really something that shocks the senses because it’s something Canadian television doesn’t necessarily do. Canadians are known for being nice and kind and gentle and sweet about the way we treat people. Doing something that is so offensive in that way is not in our nature and I think that’s been one of the problems that we have in Canadian culture. We’re afraid to get out there and be as outrageous as one possibly can be, in a tasteful way I must say, but at least enough to shock the senses and get people’s attention.”
Hélène Joy, who stars in the series alongside Flashpoint’s Hugh Dillon, agrees that Canadians still have a few hang-ups regarding their homegrown entertainment. “I see things from an outsider’s view, and I really noticed the cultural fringe - that’s what we call it in Australia - that people have in Canada about their own culture, and it bothers me. There are too many people saying “Oh it’s Canadian, it can’t be any good”. Well, did you watch any of it?
Someone must have. Since debuting in 2007, Durham has won a following of loyal fans as well as critical acclaim in the form of Directors Guild of Canada awards and several Geminis, including one for Joy’s portrayal of Audrey Sweeny. “I was so so nervous…and worried about tripping over the dress and the stupid five inch heels,” Joy laughs, “but when you win for something you’re really proud of, you mention everybody’s name and say ‘thank God for you letting me be in the show!’”
As it turns out, it was an opportunity that almost passed her by. “I was in Australia flirting with giving up acting,” she remembers of the period before landing the role. “I was contemplating going back into business with my mother who is a real estate agent and has an agency.” Unbeknownst to Joy, however, her name kept coming up in discussions for the part. “I called my agent and she was like ‘Where the hell are you? Put this thing on tape and send it to us immediately!’ But I was in a part of Australia where they don’t even have tape facilities! It was a long process, but they gave me the job and flew me back. It was meant to be.”
Her character’s relationship with her husband, however, might be another story. “To me the entire series has been about lies. It’s about the lies that we tell ourselves and about denial and the lead character living a sort of dual life. He’s like a man-child…unable to really be the man he wants to be. He’s a good man and a really terrible man at the same time.”
Viewers will recall that the first two seasons were anything but kind to tortured Detective Mike Sweeney (Dillon), who watched his childhood friend Ray Prager (Justin Lewis) become a serial killer, and then cheated on his wife with an insane psychiatrist (played by Michelle Forbes). Thankfully, season three brings the promise of something greater for Sweeney in the form a promotion to Superintendent and a third child.
“The fact that there’s an infant - beautiful, completely innocent, untouched by the rest of the world - that’s he’s not able to connect to because of all of his shit is a shocking thing that I’ve never seen in a TV show” Joy shares. “Our leading character, our hero, is abandoning his child because he’s so, so deeply selfish and flawed. I think that’s one of the most powerful things in our third season.”
Knizhnik has weaved several other elements into the fabric of the story as well. “Season three is the world coming to Durham,” she shares. “Season three is about soldiers, it’s about war, it’s about immigrants, it’s about the communities we live in that we’re barely aware of because we’re so insistently Canadian and insistently bourgeois.”
“We spread out into suburbs, we’re in houses that we can’t afford anymore, we’re destroying green space…those are all of the kinds of things that occur in the times that we live in and television is really uniquely positioned because of the immediacy of it, to look at it and to try to put it into the culture so people can see and think about it and find ways to talk about it and not be told that they have to just chin up and manage it and be happy.”
To that end, Knizhnik has given Sweeney a new partner in the form of the deeply disturbed Ivan (Michael Nardone) and opened up the plotlines to reflect the international conflicts raging beyond Canada’s borders.
“Kosovo - along with Serbia and Croatia – is one of the horrors of the twentieth century, like Auschwitz. I don’t think on a mass cultural level that we’ve really understood it and looked at it that way. I wanted to see what it is for people who are coming from other countries who have experiences of war (to enter) into an economy that is falling apart and a social safety net that is falling apart. I wanted to see what that would be like. I think it takes Mike really by surprise. He doesn’t know what he’s dealing with. He has no idea.”
At the center of these plots, however, is a highway all too familiar to Montrealers and Torontonians alike – the 401. As Knizhnik explains, “for police, a highway like the 401 is a very tricky space to be in because there’s lot of criminality along the highway on various levels, from serial killers moving from one place to another, to contraband goods, to sex trafficking - all of that stuff. I worked years ago with an RCMP undercover cop who said ‘the nightmare really is the highway. You cannot get anything on the highway – it slips past you.’”
As the final episodes continue to air Monday nights on HBO Canada, fans of Durham are surely feeling like the series is also slipping away. They should take comfort then in the knowledge that a film is set to begin shooting next September for a 2012 release. Originally, the creative team expected a full fourth season, but as Prupas explains, “it was a choice, frankly, of our broadcasters: I guess they thought that the cycle had played itself out.”
Knizhnik remains tight-lipped about the movie’s plot - so much so that even Prupas claims to be in the dark – but rumors suggest the picture will pair Sweeney up with his daughter-turned-full-fledged-detective against her former attacker, Ray. In the meantime, Knizhnik is retelling the events of season one from a new perspective for her upcoming Durham County novel. Clearly, these characters are hard to walk away from.
“It’s continuous exploration and you don’t really wrap it up,” she observes, of her continual passion for the complex world and conflicted hero she created. “You never wrap it all up, and you always hope that you’ll be able to come back and do it again.”
Its likely Sweeney feels the same.
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